business figures out a way to profit, we don't do much of anything about stuff like this.
I have seen, in my own community, certain attempts to repurpose some of these office buildings. For example, some idealists wanted to retool the office buildings to house the homeless - a good idea on its face, but the problem is that office facilities lack things like full bathrooms in most of the spaces.
It is scary for the landlords of these office buildings, and we are also seeing this in strip malls. There is a strip mall about 1.5 miles from my home that has lost two of three anchor tenants. Those buildings have been vacant for years. This has caused the owner not to be able to adequately care for the parking lot, which has developed some axle-breaking potholes in the asphalt.
What we are seeing here is a situation where communities could rethink the way they are laid out. Maybe take transit-oriented development to the next level. The problem is, with decades of irresponsible tax cuts behind us, no local or state government has the funds to do these public projects any more.
This, coupled with the constant drumbeat of privatize, deregulate and gut government programs, has created some office deserts. These areas are then taken over by squatters, homeless people and drug dealers and become blighted.
Sadly, I have been an economist for two decades and all the policies that I have touted that would help working people - the middle class - at their kitchen tables have gone by the wayside as tax cuts and program cuts of everything but war have starved the public sector of both the money and the will to create and execute outside-the-box planning and economic development strategies.
To my mind, the current state of shareholder primacy 'survival of the fittest' capitalism not only lacks any moral compass, but has failed to help us grapple with the public good in a time with it is becoming urgent for our species to begin living in harmony with the earth, and each other.
Our current economy encourages and rewards sociopathic behavior, and until we solve that issue it may prove difficult to build the kind of strong and cohesive communities we need as the federal government devolves and eventually dissolves, brought down by the weight of corporate corruption and decades of wedge issue propaganda.
I have said before, to much opprobrium on this site, that I feel betrayed by both political parties - and yes, the Democrats are better but the institutionalists, the so-called Third Way Democrats championed by Bill Clinton in the days after the disastrous Reagan decade, have slowly acquiesced to the constant drumbeat of the right-wing propaganda apparatus until people like AOC and Bernie, who would have fit right in with FDR's New Deal, are routinely reported on my corporate media as 'far-left radical.' But they are not. They are talking about things we all need - healthcare, education, childcare, good environmental regulation and pulling the teets of Wall Street.
Now, I'm 67, but the young people I speak to in the course of my work include Gen Z, Millennials and GenX, and they are increasingly ready to tear down the whole thing and start over. A whole bunch of them are now talking 1789 and guillotines. I kid you not. Because they are disgusted.
Consider the recent story about the Amazon employee who dropped dead on the floor and everyone simply kept working around the corpse because no one wanted to fall behind. And the employee who made a video of himself burning down a Kimberly Clark warehouse while repeating, "If only they had paid us a living wage." That cost KMB shareholders and the corporation itself $500 million in damages in the face of a $2.2 billion net profit. And finally we have the lady the Trump administration flew in from Arkansas to do a doordash delivery of Mickey D's to the White House so the Donald could have a photo op. He didn't want a non-white dasher who was an immigrant, apparently.
I mean, our system is rotten to the core, and I think it is a mistake for many in our party to believe that once Trump is gone, they will be able to bring things back to the way they were. Because the way things were did not work for most of the middle class. Biden spent four years telling us how great the economy was - and it was. For Wall Street. For the middle class not so much. I for example, do pretty well, but carried over $10K in HEALTH CARE DEBT during that time. I have younger colleagues who are so buried in student debt they can barely make ends meet and many in Gen Z despair because they work their butts off and can't even pay rent some months.
Wall Street and the billionaires are squeezing too hard, because greed knows no boundaries - it grasps whatever it can whenever it can. Now, Trump has unleashed 65 billionaires and his own family on our treasury, and like locusts, they are stripping it clean and leaving us flapping in the wind.
Will our party, we wonder, have the vision and the grit to build something new, something that works for us all? Or will it just back to the same old Wall Street squeeze?
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